![]() ![]() ![]() On their surface, these images appear playfully performative, joyful, and imbued with child-like humour and imagination. She gradually begins to recruit “friends, a couple of young women in my office, and several wayward poets” § and asks them to pose for her whilst wearing Steinberg’s masks additionally, she finds new locations in which to set them, including an elegant Gramercy Park townhouse, rooms at the Chelsea Hotel, Long Island beaches and beach-houses, and elsewhere. But gradually, as Steinberg’s masks developed and evolved over the years – from plain self-portraits into a variety of elegant, elaborate bug-eyed creatures who often sport unsettlingly manic smiles, or alternatively into a medley of heavy-browed, heavily-shadowed sculptural characters who seem to exude a rich and rather world-weary interior world – Morath’s photographs also become more dynamic and improvisational. The earliest pictures begin with Steinberg in his own apartment, simply modeling masks that reflect variations of his own alter-ego a remarkably consistent long-faced, bespectacled middle-aged man, plainly drawn with a wide moustache and a perpetual deadpan expression (rendered as simply as possible a single, straight, perfectly horizontal line for a mouth). There she quickly encountered contact-sheets sent in by Cartier-Bresson, stating years later, “In studying way of photographing I learned how to photograph myself, before I ever took a camera into my hand.” † By the early-50s, Morath had become a successful photographer in her own right, and was invited to join Magnum as such in 1953, spending the following decade travelling the world and publishing photo-essays in magazines such as Holiday, Paris Match, Vogue, and more. Robert Capa – impressed by her writing for Heute, a magazine published in German by Information Services Branch of the US Army in Occupied Germany – invited her to work as an editor in Magnum’s office in Paris in 1949. Born in Austria in 1923, Inge Morath spent her teenage years in pre-war Berlin, and then studied languages at the University of Berlin throughout the Second World War, eventually becoming fluent in French, English, Romanian, Spanish, Russian and Chinese, as well as in her native German.Īfter the war, she initially worked as a translator for occupying Americans, and then as a journalist throughout Europe. ![]()
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